TEXAS CITY, Texas (AP) — A barge that once carried some 900,000 gallons of heavy tar-like oil was cleared Sunday of its remaining contents, a day after the vessel collided with a ship in the busy Houston Ship Channel and leaked as much as a qua...

Tampons have been hailed by scientists as an effective way to identify pollution in rivers.

A new study led by David Lerner, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Sheffield, helped identify specific households where pipes are misdirecting sewage into rivers rather than treatment plants.

During the study, the tampons were suspended on rods above 16 different surface water outlets which ran into rivers and streams. Afterwards they were dipped in diluted detergent for five seconds, where nine of them showed up optical brighteners (chemical compounds) under ultraviolet light, indicating the presence of water pollution.

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The team worked with Yorkshire Water to trace the pipe network back from four of the nine pollution sites and dipped tampons in each manhole to discover the source of the leak.

This revealed which households required their pipelines to be tested, including one where both a sink and a soil stack were connected to the wrong pipes.

Lerner said pollution in rivers is usually widespread and difficult to track, with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimating in 2009 that around 5% of homes have incorrectly connected waste water pipes.

“All you need is for someone to have a cowboy builder and connect their appliances to the wrong drain and you have sewage going into the river,” he said.

If you have any doubt about the contempt that some leaders within the pork industry have for their own customers – to say nothing of the pigs locked in gestation crates – the dispute over a dangerous animal drug named ractopamine should dispel it. On Monday, McClatchy reported that the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) is maneuvering to derail free trade talks with the European Union unless the EU agrees to accept imports of pork from pigs fed ractopamine. Ractopamine is a beta-agonist (a drug used to treat asthma in humans) that producers feed pigs, cattle and turkeys to induce rapid weight gain. It is banned or restricted in around 160 nations—including in the EU and even in Russia and China. But that hasn’t stopped the American pork industry, which now treats an estimated 60 to 80 percent of its pigs with ractopamine, from routinely using the drug.

For the first time in a century, endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep are back on their ancestral range and headed toward recovery, wildlife officials said Monday. During an ongoing relocation effort, dozens of bighorns have been captured with nets dropped from helicopters then moved to...

The cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization last week announced that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, is probably carcinogenic to humans. But the assessment, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, has been followed by an immediate backlash from industry groups.

On March 23, Robb Fraley, chief technology officer at the agrochemical company Monsanto in St Louis, Missouri, which sells much of the world’s glyphosate, accused the IARC of “cherry picking” data. “We are outraged with this assessment,” he said in a statement. Nature explains the controversy.

The main reason soaring greenhouse gas emissions have not caused air temperatures to rise more rapidly is that oceans have soaked up much of the heat. But new evidence suggests the oceans’ heat-buffering ability may be weakening. by cheryl katz

For decades, the earth’s oceans have soaked up more than nine-tenths of the atmosphere’s excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions. By stowing that extra energy in their depths, oceans have spared the planet from feeling the full effects of humanity’s carbon overindulgence.

News that a Texas city is to be powered by 100% renewable energy sparked surprise in an oil-obsessed, Republican-dominated state where fossil fuels are king and climate change activists were described as “the equivalent of the flat-earthers” by US senator and GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz.

“I was called an Al Gore clone, a tree-hugger,” says Jim Briggs, interim city manager of Georgetown, a community of about 50,000 people some 25 miles north of Austin.

The latest victim of Florida governor Rick Scott’s unwritten ban on state officials using the words “climate change” is his own disaster preparedness lieutenant, who stumbled through verbal gymnastics to avoid using the scientific term in a newly surfaced video.

The argument for divesting from fossil fuels is becoming overwhelming Read more Bryan Koon, Florida’s emergency management chief, was testifying before the state senate’s budget subcommittee on Thursday, answering questions about the news that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) will pull federal funding from states that refuse to directly address climate change.

In the video, uploaded by the advocacy group Forecast The Facts, Senator Jeff Clemens asks Koon whether he is aware of the updated Fema guidelines, which would block 2016 funding in states whose governors refuse to implement so-called hazard mitigation plans for global warming.

Koon affirmed that the state’s next plan would be required to include “language to that effect”.

“Once the oil started to sink, it made things a lot more difficult on our recovery.”

Those were the words of Greg Powell of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during his presentation on March 10th at the National Academy of Sciences conference on the Effects of Diluted Bitumen on the Environment. Powell was one of the people involved in the response and clean up of the Kalamazoo River tar sands dilbit spill in 2010 where an Enbridge pipeline cracked and spilled approximately one million gallons of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

Powell presented a disturbing account of what happened at Kalamazoo with pictures showing a river with “bank to bank” oil and contamination for almost 40 miles. This damage took over four years and more than a billion dollars to clean up. And Powell explained the main reason was that diluted bitumen isn’t like other oil.

Now, however, beef producers are replacing Zilmax with ractopamine, though it seems to offer little for the well-being of their animals while risking serious harm to them. The drug has been linked to nearly a quarter-million cases of adverse reactions in pigs, including lameness, trembling, hyperactivity, hoof disorder, dyspnea, collapse and death.

Beef eaters should be concerned. The Food and Drug Administration’s original approval of ractopamine included no safety assessment on humans.

Higher levels of pesticide residue in fruit and vegetables are associated with lower quality of semen, according to a study published on Tuesday. Its authors said the research was only an early step in what should be a much wider investigation.

Just 17% of England's rivers are judged to be in good health, according to Environment Agency figures. This is down from 29% with a good ecological status in 2014. The analysis is shocking, say environmentalists. Problems are caused by over-abstraction and pollution from farms, run-off from roads and effluent from sewage works - as well as invasive species. The Environment Agency says the figures look bad because the EU's assessment criteria have been tightened. "Threatens wildlife"

Michigan awards $350000 in grants for dam removal, fixes Escanaba Daily Press LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The state of Michigan has awarded $350,000 to four projects that will remove obsolete dams or fix those needing repairs.

Pramilla Malick was reading in bed last summer when suddenly she had to struggle to breathe. Gasping, she went outside and then back inside, getting no relief from the country air around her home in Minisink, New York. Her symptoms began at a time when her children and some of their Minisink neighbors were also experiencing new ailments, such as nausea, nosebleeds, rashes, sore throats, asthma and dizziness. Their symptoms would erupt during or after an “odor event,” a period of malodorous emissions at the new Millennium Pipeline gas compressor station nearby that began functioning in June of 2013. Malick’s asthmatic symptoms, which she never had before, surface only on weekends in Minisink, she says; they live in New York City, 95 miles away, on weekdays.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — The number of foreign fishermen stranded on several remote eastern Indonesian islands has spiraled to 4,000, including some revealed in an Associated Press investigation to have been enslaved.

Many are migrant workers abandoned by their boat captains after the government passed a moratorium on foreign fishing five months ago, according to the International Organization for Migration, which released the figure Friday. However, others have been trapped on the islands for years, after being dumped by fishing boats or escaping into the jungle.

You may have read the same headlines I did earlier this month about new laws passed in France now requiring solar panels or vegetation sections on the roofs of all new commercial construction. French activists were pushing for 100 percent roof coverage but had to settle for Parliament requiring a minimum of coverage. Interest in this story in United States is surprising. With few exceptions, green roofs get treated as little more than a curiosity rather than a viable solution to so many of the urban planning problems we are confronted with today.

The iconic Tasmanian swift parrot is facing population collapse and could become extinct within 16 years, new research has found. Swift parrots are major pollinators of blue and black gum trees which are crucial to the forestry industry, which controversially continues to log swift parrot habitat.

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